Sharpshooter
Recalls Battle
for Israeli
Independence SELAH MAYA ZIGHELBOIM | JE STAFF
I n the 1840s, Moishe Zvi Lewensohn heard that the Messiah
would soon come, and he moved to a small piece of land in the
Middle East — then called Palestine under Turkish rule — to
await the arrival.

He never saw the Messiah, but a century later, his
great-great-granddaughter helped transform that small piece of
the Middle East into a country for the Jewish people.

Bella Lewensohn Schafer, 90, served as a sharpshooter and an
officer in charge of a battalion of women during the Israeli War
of Independence.

Getting married, having children — those were once-in-a-
lifetime occasions, but fighting for Israeli’s independence was
more than that, she said.

“I’m part of Israel history,” said Schafer, a member of Temple
Beth Zion-Beth Israel and an honorary member of Congregation
Rodeph Shalom.

Schafer was born in Israel in 1928, so when the war against
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Bella Lewensohn Schafer (front row, second from left) during her
time in the Israeli army
Photo courtesy of Deborah Schafer
Bella Lewensohn Schafer in her
Center City home
Photo by Selah Maya Zighelboim
British rule broke out, she was 20 years old.

But her participation in Israeli independence began before
her military involvement, when she was a young teenager. She
grew up in Jerusalem, and helped the war effort by transporting
weapons with other girls in her youth group. They would hide
grenades in their clothes and transport them on the bus. There
were few weapons in the early days of the Israeli military, so they
had to be careful with anything they got their hands on.

“It was very unsophisticated, and we had to be very careful
of the British,” Schafer recalled. “It was a very secretive, under-
ground type of a thing.”
When Schafer joined the army, she was sent to an officers
training to be put in charge of a group of women in the war
effort. At first, women and men served in two different armies, then
the women’s group was dissolved and attached to the men’s
group. When she first approached the men’s camp in her role as an
officer, she was met with skepticism. Schafer was a “little, some-
what chubby girl,” she said, and the men were unused to having
women in their camps.

She met a group of men sitting outside and asked to see their
commander. They pointed to her gun and asked her if she could
use it. Then they asked her to prove it by shooting a bottle.

She did.

Sharpshooting was always something she was good at.

The war, Schafer said, “was awful. That’s all there is to it. It was
really awful, and we, the women, behaved just like the men. We
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